How prevalent were firearms during the Renaissance?

Now that I think about it, you might also be confusing Renaissance art (which, although at times had Roman inspiration, was for the most part original) with Neoclassicism, the ca. 1750-1850 movement caused by the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum which, as far as I know, was the one responsible for the scrubbing of what was left of the colors on Antiquity and Middle Ages statues and buildings (e.g. Notre Dame, if memory serves). It would also correspond with what you were saying of anticlerical (and to a lesser extent antinobility) thought, since the period corresponds to the Enlightenment.

As said, there really wasn't much criticism of Christianity nor of the Church; although there was, at times very heavy, criticism of its current form and exponents, and not just by Luther - see most famously Dante's (and the guy was anything but irreligious) hatred on Boniface VIII, whom he places as punishment for simony upside down in a hole in Hell, his feet burning, and on Clement V, who he says is soon going join Boniface.
Ironically, Martin Luther's Reformation was actually what caused such criticism to stop: as it forced the church to get their shit together, mostly stopping simonies et alia, and making them crack down much harder on criticism of them and deviations from their canons (see Giordano Bruno, or indeed the more fortunate Galileo Galilei) - the "Age of the Inquisition", or more appropriately the Counter-Reformation, which in my opinion marks the end of the Renaissance, as both thought and arts were much more regulated and I would say somewhat more sterile.

As a mostly unrelated, final point, it is true that the demarcation between Middle-Age and Modern Age is less precise and evident that the one between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, or even the Bronze Age and Antiquity; but it's mostly because the transition wasn't caused by large-scale catastrophic events like those two other transitions; and because, as was said by our US friend, Renaissance started at different times in different parts of Europe (1300 in Italy, 1400-1500 for the rest of Europe) - but once you account for this, the demarcation between Middle Ages and Modern Age becomes quite evident, as it's marked by the drastic centralization of power that would eventually lead to Nation-States.

I'm Italian, but currently abroad; and am too lazy to go through a proxy.

I really don't see how Imperialism comes from the Enlightenment, especially considering how it goes against its core principles - and how its origins can be found at least a century before the Enlightenment.

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I'd say that Spengler's idea in a nutshell (although he seems to be more of a man of art and mathematics, while I'm all about realpolitik) is that barbarians first tame themselves, then tame their lands. As this taming happens society becomes more stable, cities start to rise, and eventually they form a civlilization: a highly sophisticated and urbanite world of their own. This process takes around 1000 years, give or take. Once a civilization is developed it turns inward and becomes vulnerable. A good example is China: from a collection of states they turned into one gigantic blob of cities and rice paddies ripe for conquest. And indeed, they had a Mongolian dynasty followed by a Manchu dynasty. They are just so gigantic that even that didn't make a dent in their population, and so the civilization survived to this day, even if it changed a lot. India is a similar civilization, expect that it took the Brits to give that subcontinent a central state. Unlike those two Rome was completely destroyed by the barbarians.
Then those barbarians went on to start taming themselves and built a civilization of their own. We are currently living in that civilization, and it's the result of a millenium of becoming more-and-more stable, which led to the rise of cities. But here is the problem: we aren't the inhertors of Rome. History is not linear, it's cyclical just like life. Animals born and die the same way civilizations rise and fall. So it's obvious that there is a great difference between the Roman civilization and the Western culture that followed it. Just as there is a great difference between an old man and a child. You should compare the child with the child who once that old man was, and you should compare the old man with the old man whom that child will turn into. So splitting the whole history of the world into two at the point where Rome fell is arbitrary. You could say that antiquity ended with a random Egyptian dynasty, and the middle ages ended with the death of Caesar, and everything after that is the modern world. It would be just that arbitraty.
Also, splitting the "medieval" and "modern" periods isn't helpful at all either. It's like trying to figure out the exact point at which a grown man turns into a middle-aged man. Yes, we all feel the difference between the two, but we also know that it's pointless to find the exact year, because it's a gradual process. According to Spengler European history really starts around 1000 A.D., and the centuries before that are the period where the foundations are laid down as the barbarians form their first kingdoms. Then after 1000 it's the story of increasing stability and the rise of cities. Of course the standards of living fell after the fall of Rome, a highly sophisticated urbanite civilization was replaced by a collection of tribes who were living in huts a few generations ago. Again, it's not a good reason to split time itself into two, as it had no effects even just a few hundred kilometers away.

That's just a natural part of increasing stability. The Hanseatic League on the north was the exact same thing with their trade and arts. The real difference is that they weren't aping old ruins, so during the Enlightenment they were promptly forgotten. Then later it was declared that their art is also part of the renaissance. But renaissance means rebirth, as in the rebirth of the Graeco-Roman arts, which is patently false. And again, pretending that this is a historical period is a bad idea, because it had no real impact on anything other than the arts.

That's wrong, because -as I wrote before- it's supposed to be the renaissance of the Graeco-Roman art. Take away that and the name makes no sense. It was a period more stable and prosperous than preceding periods, yet less stable and prosperous than succeeding periods. It's no wonder, as since the end of the so-called feudal anarchy it's a constant increase of stability and prosperity in Europe.
Again, the renaissance was used by people who came after it was over to paint the previous centuries as the dark ages, and then used the myth of the dark ages against everything that didn't fir their narrative.

Thank you for your input. But tell me, do you disagree with the scientists who found the residue of pigments on these statues, or do find these bright and childish colours appealing?

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Even if you limit the Renaissance to just art and nothing else (which really is disingenuous), you still can't say it didn't extend farther than Italy. Northern Flanders in particular was another hub of emergent Renaissance artwork, and France and Spain had their share of masters as well.

What?
And who, if I may ask, ever said it's splitting the whole history of the whole world in two? It certainly split two periods of European history.

Even without going into theories stating that genetics shape culture, it's pretty obvious that aspects of Roman (and, through it, Greek) civilization and culture got to us, be it directly - as for instance in language, religion, morals, the idea of individual vs the state - or through the "aping" of which you talk - which far from belonging only in the arts, as you seem to suggest, was also at the root of humanist thought - or do you think no one read Plato or Cicero? Do you think Virgil was used as toilet paper? And, even more indirectly but perhaps just as importantly, who do you think Napoleon was inspired by when he conquered half of Europe and spread the scientific and civil progress of revolutionary France? The fucker was obviously comparing himself with Caesar, as is evident from his writings! And Napoleon is only one among many of the "imperialists" trying to mimic what Rome did in Europe, and that no one anywhere else on the world ever tried doing.
Shit, there's a reason modern democracy was born in Europe, and that it's called democracy. We're so fucking surrounded by echoes of Antiquity that your statements simply baffle me. Sure, there was an influx of "barbarians" that "destroyed" Rome (hahaha), but those fuckers certainly didn't replace Romans and certainly didn't destroy their culture, just like Romans certainly didn't replace Greeks, and how the Greek culture was a huge influence on Rome.
And of course, many of those elements were warped by the passage of time - just how they evolved within Antiquity itself, although in a different way due to different conditions, and without the catastrophic events surrounding the fall of the Empire.

Even in your gross analogy with an old man and a new child what you say doesn't make sense: the child is the son of the man that died! How can it not be its inheritor? And even if it wasn't its child and didn't have its genetics (which it has), aren't the younger generations shaped by their predecessors?

So you're saying that we should treat children and adults the same, and the young and the elderly? Of fucking course 1492 is an arbitrary date, just like 18 is an arbitrary age; but its purpose is representing a radical shift in the nature of human intellect and conscience in the latter case, society and culture in the first - namely the centralization of power that I mentioned in my previous post, that led to the formation of Nations; the birth and spread of humanist thought, which shaped those nations into the democracies we enjoy today; and the birth of modern science, which eventually enabled you to post this nonsense online.

Wow, you could call cows pigs! You could call cars flowers! You could call a man who cut his dick off a woman! Names are arbitrary!
Fucking wew. The Antiquity is a name people gave to that period because it was ancient; the Modern Age was modern for the historians that called it that; and Middle Ages are in the middle between Antiquity and the Modern Age; and these names have stuck because it's how language works. Wow! Surprising! Astounding!
Or maybe you'd rather not use names at all - instead, you could say "the period in Europe going roughly from the end of the V century to the end of the XV, depending on the specific part of Europe you're looking at, that distinguishes itself from the previous period by the fall of the Roman Empire and the loss stability, rule of law and prosperity it brought, and from the following period by the importance of regional powers, a lack of a relatively educated urban upper-middle class and the artistic, cultural, technological and cultural advances its eventual rise brought, and the disregard for the tenets of humanistic thought in favor of feudal rules and morals". That's how people like to speak, right?

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Isn'd dat jusd an arbidrary date? :DDDDD

I've always thought that trying to find big patterns in history, and making big pseudotheories around them, is both a futile and useless effort distracting from why things actually happened the way they did and why things are the way they are.

Wrong
Fucking lmao
Source? Because in my dictionary it's also referring to Graeco-Roman thought (see humanism), and to a general rebirth of culture after and as opposed to the dark ages. Besides, since when do names have to have a 1:1 correspondence between etymology and meaning? Should we find new names for "church", "candidate", "emperor", or literally all of English and the rest of the human languages?

You're wrong
That's not what distinguishes Renaissance from the late Middle-Ages or to the Counter-Reform period.
Go back to the nineteenth century, positivism was already laughed at back then.

Because it isn't at least directly, the problem is that a lot of "political historians" see it that way and showing that was the goal of my post. If you look at the content these people produce, they seem to be of the opinion that between the 16th and until the first half of the 20th century Europe committed crime after crime against the poor people of the world and they try to expose it by showing how the knowledge and views the people had during these periods were false, hence all claims to European superiority are void in their mind.

Spenglers idea is false and you would knew that if you actually took the time to look at how humanity actually developed over the centuries.
The so called "barbarians" can't first tame themselves and then their lands, because the human as a living organism has an impact on his environment and a certain level of control over it.
The developing of human society and their influence on the territory around them is simultaneous.
Which is historically false, but was an accepted academic view at the time Spengler lived.
This is simply wrong, because of the level of influence these things had. Rome had a huge impact on all of Europe, North Africa and West Asia. Egypt on the other hand was just a major power of the Mediterranean world.
When Egypt had lost its glory despite the almost 4000 years of history, its was just treated as one of the many Kingdoms that went and were gone. When the Roman Empire that dominated Europe for just a couple of centuries vanished, it lead to a long period of strife, but also to the transportation of Roman technology and culture outside the traditional boarders the Roman Empire. Part of the reason behind the Christianization of Europe was the goal of European Kings to get access to Latin Scribes and with them access to the Technology and Logistics of Rome.
Its not wrong and your statement only shows your lack of knowledge about the historic meaning of the word "art". Art at the time of the Renaissance didn't just mean a certain look for fancy decoration, but was a synonym for skill, knowledge and ability.
The goal of Renaissance artist was not only to recreate the look of the Greek and Roman culture, but also to reach their cultural abilities. They weren't just trying to make cool statues, but also experimented with architecture, researched medicine, explored ancient philosophy and build machines.
A huge part of the Renaissance was the mechanization that happened all over Europe, Windmills were build in great numbers to mill grain, Water and Tidemills were build to cut wood, make paper, cloth and metal wire or drive the hammer for a forge. Also maritime technology was advanced and put Europe at the top of the world.
Neither look bad and the only childish thing here is your understanding of history. Do you have any idea how much work it took for these people to produce these colors and paint their cityscape with them in antiquity?
Additionally they(the colored statues) look better than most statues made by so called artists since the Cold War.

Just tell me this: did the people of France and Flanders name their architecture gothic they thought they were goths, or was it named as such by an Italian who thought that they are the descendants of the barbarians who destroyed Rome? If you label every piece of art in Europe from the 1300s to the 1600s as renaissance art, then of course that it's everywhere. But most of those artist north of the Alps didn't take part in this artistic movement of "reviving" the Roman artistic style, they just painted pictures that were stylish in that time.

Then discussing anything with you is a waste of time. Enjoy your ignorance as the world you knew crumbles around you for reasons you will never comprehend.

Let's supposed that a great plague or something eradicated 99% of Chinese a thousand years ago or so. Would it make Korea and Japan the inheritors of China? Would that make then Chinese? And what if they surpassed anything China ever had while crying about how the world will never be the same because China was lost?

I would think these people would hold Enlightenment in high esteem, considering its supposed "antireligion" tendencies (while in reality they were just for removing or reducing temporal power and privilege of the clergy) and egalitarian ideals; but then again, I have seen a surprising number of "intellectuals" rejecting those ideals in this past couple years.
Are you referring to someone in particular?

Just to play Devil's Advocate, I do think the US is in for a decline of sorts in the next century, although it's not going to be some catastrophic "crumble," just a loss of imperium. The magyar's completely wrong as to how and why this will happen, though.

History repeats itself in the sense that big empire with cultural hegemony will fall and give ways to lesser empires/kingdoms.

And this is actually a good thing.

I don't know about that. The French and the Germans produced a great volume of literature in the 12th and early 13th centuries and I personally think that at least a few of those works are of a comparable quality to what came before and what came after.

This. If there was conflict between artists and the Church, it was because of the divide between Scholasticism, which had a very pragmatic and utilitarian view of the way people should function, and Renaissance Humanism, which had a higher, more idealistic view of humanity and what it could achieve. The Humanists of the early Renaissance sincerely believed that this new philosophy would solve most of humanity's problems and launch it to unimaginable new heights. This great hope for the future of mankind is reflected in a lot of the art and literature of the time. However, by the 17th century, when religious tensions were higher, authorities were more corrupt, and wars were more bloody than they had ever been in the Middle Ages, it was clear that these dreams were never going to be a reality. This was also reflected in much of the art and literature of the time. Don Quixote, or at least the second half of it, can almost be read as a lamentation of Humanism's failure.

tbf anyone with the least artistic competence can make anything better to the post-WWII artist so that isn't saying much.

You're confusing the Dark Ages (476 to 800-1000 AD depending on who you ask), aka High Middle Age for romance countries' historians and Early Middle Age for anglos, with the period you're referring to, called Low Middle Age by romance historians and High/Late Middle Ages by anglos.

Not many would say the 1100-1200 are part of the Dark Ages, due to the fact that regional-level powers were already stabilized, state-level entities were well in the process of unification already, technical and technological mastery was evolving at a good pace (setting up the scene for the Renaissance); and, as a telling symptom, big cathedrals were being built and French (and German, I'll trust you on that - don't personally know much on early German literature) were writing or had already written what are considered to be the first big works of their national literature (e.g. La Chanson de Roland, written around 1100).
To indicate just how close we are to the actual Renaissance, it's considered by some to have started in Italy in the late XIII/early XIV centuries with the works of Dante (e.g. The Divine Comedy, 1308-1320, and Petrarca), and have spread to other countries in Europe one to two centuries later, depending on the country and on how exactly you define "Renaissance" and "have spread".

This period is documented well-enough; by contrast, we really don't know much of what was going on in the Dark Ages (another reason they're called that way), mostly due to a relative lack of bureaucratic apparati, authors (who can be a good source of historical information, like the aforementioned Dante), historians, and generally speaking intellectuals and books. Some would say it's because people were too poor/too busy getting killed to care about those; it's more safe to say it's because of a multitude of reasons, poverty and local instability - even for cities, who were still getting pillaged/changing hands on a relatively regular basis - being chief among them.

I do agree that modern reconstructions of the colors on the statues don't look so good; but I trust the aesthetical sense of ancient Greeks (and, by proxy, Romans), considering their other works. Either they didn't get all the colors right, or those colors complemented well the context where they were placed in and that we have lost.
Today, the scrubbed statues are for the most part exposed in the white-stone halls of Neoclassicist buildings; colored statues would stick out like sore thumbs. But imagine them in their original context: colorful Greek temples, where naked stone and pigments are carefully put together to form the most beautiful scenery in the hall of the gods; roman public buildings, made to impress citizens and fellow politicians; and the private domus of rich senators, where every wall is a fresque and every floor a mosaic.
Tbh, it's making me sad we have lost most of this.

Take the Parthenon atop the Athenian acropolis, for instance: if you've ever visited the British Museum you'll have seen the hundred of meters of metopes (sculptures decorating the band above the columns all around the temple) stolen by the British after roaches and sea jews blew up the Parthenon. Imagine all of those, each detail carefully painted, under the sun of Greece and atop the bustling city of Athens, a colossal statue of Athena watching over it from but a few dozens meters from the temple.

Obvious statements do not make for a theory. Sure, eventually every empire will fall; but how, why, and when? This kind of fatalistic approaches to history often mask the truth and hinder its pursuit. Take for instance operation Barbarossa: nowadays most are certain that it was a "doomed" endeavor. The way it was organized as a short campaign, it most certainly was. But why? Why did they set out to have such a short campaign? Why wouldn't it have worked? What were the tactical mistakes at the onset of the operation? Organizational mistakes? Logistical ones? Fortuitous events? What went wrong? What about the Soviet side?
Those questions are often ignored in favor of a wide "well, it failed and could only fail because *insert general reason like the Soviets had more men, Germans were fighting on two fronts, the Russian winter*"; and it only gets exponentially worse when you take such generalization on wide-scale events like the birth or fall of an empire; or worse yet, when you try to generalize your generalizations over the birth and fall of empires with a statistical sample of laughably small size, like the Magyar and Spengler did.

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Whoah, be careful, matey! Next you will tell us that by around 1000 or 1100-1200 (arbidrary gnumbers :DDDD) the descendants of the peoples of the migration period managed to make stable societies, and that led to a gradual process of urbanization that lasted for centures. We all know that after the 17th century towns were depopulated, citizens disappeared, money become less-and-less relevant in politics, long-distance trade became too risky for anyone to attempt, and most people couldn't leave their village without the risk of meeting marauders and beasts.
only a fuggen bositivist madman woud say odherwise :DDDD
Because the citizens get content in their daily lives of pursuing money and scraps of power, so they simply stop caring about the world outside of their comfortable cities. Meanwhile politicians fight for what seems to be the ultimate goal: to fully control the state. So both the bureaucracy and the armed forces became nothing more than playthings in their little games, and that makes both of them useless. Eventually the army won't be able to fight a proper war, and the empire's power will be but a bluff. Now read the F-35 threads and tell me that it doesn't ring a single bell in your mind.
You not only missed the forest for a tree, you can't even find the tree because you bumped your head into a branch. The second world war is important because it was a fight between "blood" and "money", and the later won, so as of now the politics of the Western civilization are still being dominated by money. And this is why the average citizen is perfectly fine with his masters outscoring the industrial might of their homeland into foreign (and unfriendly) powers and import aliens to replace them, all in the name of economic growth. Would it be possible to find something that is generally very similar if you go through history with a rather rough comb? Or do you have to listen to the exact same story a thousand times before you can find similarities between this and other tales?

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False. Crossbows were more powerful than firearms for a long-ass time. Early firearms didn't penetrate most of armor, while xbows did, if we not talking artillery.
It was more or less that way before muskets with heavy bullets became common. Musketers also pretty much replaced those polearm-guys, OP asked about.
It did not happen because some guy invened musket though, but rather because of economics, production methods and as a result conscription methods changed and allowed for way bigger armies.

Faggot.

Considering that both Korea and Japan was settled by people from China it would not be a problem in that regard.
Your point falls flat no matter how much you try to doge the fact, Spenglers views are based on horrible outdated information about the past.

Oh they love the Enlightenment as long as they can use it for antireligious and egalitarian speeches, but in truth they absolute despise it because the cornerstone of the Enlightenment was reason and both the majority of modern academics and liberals hate nothing more than reason.
Nah just a general observation.

Strelok do you lack reading comprehension? If you read my post, then you can see that I wrote that firearms came up in the late medieval period, the earliest date we have is 1326 for hand cannons.
If you then would have read further, you would notice that the first victories of infantry armed with the arquebus happened in the time frame from 1503 to 1600. In other words more or less a good 200 years later, so how is this not a long time?
A good example are the Conquistadors of the 16th century, during the Conquest of Mexico(1519–1521) Crossbowmen were still a major part of the Troops, however during the Conquest of the Inca Empire(1532–1572) they were a vanishing minority and you can see that the Battles of Bicocca(1522) and Pavia(1525) fall directly in between those dates.
This is false for two reason. First is the fact that the claim that crossbows/bows could penetrate armor in a significant way has been disproven a long time ago, proper armor at that time was mostly impenetrable to weapons.
Secondly among the first adopters of firearms in Europe were Knights and they wouldn't adopt them if it was unable to harm other Knights.
Musketers would have been unable to replace Pikemen if they didn't have the Bayonet and you can see that Armies replaced their Pikemen with the introduction of the Bayonet.

You're still around?

All had already formed stable societies by the end of the VI century (e.g. kingdom of Lombards), most even by the end of the V (e.g. kingdom of Franks, kingdom of Visigoths). It may surprise you, but by the end of the VIII some dude - named Charles, or something - even managed to build another empire! Crazy stuff.
"Barbarians" had come into the Roman Empire to settle, and most did so immediately. Or did you hold the view that barbarians were roaming Europe for six centuries straight, pillaging and killing helpless locals?

Maybe you do.

Of course when you take arbitrarily long periods and arbitrarily large regions you'll see an increase in these things; but what you're conveniently ignoring is that there were multiple stumbling points along the way, and at times large regions saw a long-term decrease in those things you mentioned: such as Italy getting irrelevant due to having no access to the Atlantic and no national-level state, then Spain and Portugal losing power, riches and trade in favor of France and England due to a multitude of reasons; or the slow decline of Russian influence (and Eastern countries in general) in the international scene, and the decline in prosperity of the region, as it missed most of the industrial revolution, eventually leading to the Soviet Revolution; or further still the fall of colonial empires (partly) with the World Wars.

Are you saying that the Minoan civilization, the Hittite Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Carthaginian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Muslim Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and then the Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Napoleonic, Russian, Dutch, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, English, French Empires - and all the rest of the empires in the rest of the fucking world, for the entirety of past and future human history - all fell because of these same, generic reasons?
Or would you rather play the "ah, only the couple empires in this list where the reasons I listed could be more or less applied are *true* empires!" card? After all, you seem prone to define words as you please, and as fits your purposes.

And you're mistaking the finger for the moon. Barbarossa is an example of how even for a relatively simple event, very limited in both time and space, a fatalistic approach to history hinders its understanding. Now multiply that by the scale of the fall of an empire, and multiply that by the scale of all empires in all of history.

Here's the fundamental issue. You have your pseudotheory, and then you select whatever events or distorted interpretation of those fits it, and conveniently ignore the rest either purposefully or for lack of education.
Actual historical study first looks at what happened, and then appropriately applies labels and categories in order to facilitate discussion and thought. What makes these dates not "arbidrary" is that they're obtained by looking at actual trends and key shifts in all aspects of human life and history - that I won't bother repeating again, since you've shown yourself deaf to them in all your replies.
You're showing yourself to be no different in nature to those "social studies" people and "political historians" distorting, discarding, making up half-truths to push their narrative. Not knowing shit is fine; the empty arrogance of ignoring manifest truth as it's shoved in your face, just because it contradicts you or your fetishized and easy theories, is despicable - and typical of the kind of positivism I'd hoped Leopardi had buried forever.

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Because it's simple.
Empires grow float, people lose identity and trust in the empire, stronger, more tight-knit group appear and overtake it.

You are looking for specific reasons when the general reasons have been in repetition.

While I think Spangler's model is retarded, I don't think you can discount a cyclical theory entirely—so long as you acknowledge that generalized theories can only give generalized predictions, and aren't hard and fast predictors of what happens. To that end, I think it's fair to say that any Imperial power, which is to say any large, established state that pursues an expansionist policy, has a lifespan on it. This is because the people of the empire petition or maneuver those in power to benefit themselves or their group, at the expense of everyone else. As everyone is endeavoring to suck on the government teat at the expense of everyone else simultaneously, productivity necessarily starts to go down over time, and will continue until the empire breaks. This break doesn't have to mean a total collapse, it can take any number of forms. Balkanization, for instance, or simply the colonies becoming independent. On average, this takes about ten generations or ~250 years to set in, from the start of a nation becoming imperial to the end of that period.

I'd have to disagree on this one specific point, although your argument is well-made. The Russians were late to the party with the building up of industry, in the nineteenth century they were catching up pretty quickly–for 18 of the 25 years right before WWI they were the fastest growing economy in the world, and had surpassed France as the fourth largest industrial power. If the commies had never been let back into the country by the Germs that trend would have continued and Russia would have become a far more powerful industrial base.

Sorry if this reply is badly written, it's quite late here.

I'm not saying empires, or even nations, don't have a limited lifespan, or that they don't follow a cycle, quite the opposite: I'm saying that empires and nations necessarily have a lifespan and follow a rise-fall cycle (with sometimes but not always a period of stagnation between the two): there wouldn't be any empire if there wasn't a rise, and since there is a non-zero chance an empire may fall, it will eventually fall. Those things are obvious, and I don't think there's much insight to be gained in them, nor do I deem them interesting.
Neither am I saying that there are no common points between all empires (otherwise they wouldn't be grouped together and classified as empires!), some of which facilitate their inevitable fall: you have indeed pointed one out, namely that the citizens of an empire don't share an identity - with all the benefits a shared identity entails. Indeed, forging, fostering, and exploiting such an identity was one of the key "advancements" of the modern era, and indeed it is the union and correspondence of a people (in its fullest meaning) and a state to be called a "nation" (notice that you mostly encounter that term when talking of modern countries). Nationalism is a powerful glue, and helps keeping territories united - or even getting them united: I would never have had the opportunity call myself "Italian" without it.

What I'm contesting is uniting those two things - the necessary cyclical nature of empires and their inherent characteristics - simply because I think it's useless, and might even be harmful.
Not only is it an union of obvious with obvious: as you've said, those theories are also neither hard nor fast predictors (nor explainers). So, you've got yourself a theory that does not give any new insight, and only explains part of the reason any empire falls, and only does so some of the times. What's the point?
You had empires and countries falling because of losing defensive wars, losing aggressive wars, winning defensive wars but not enough, winning aggressive wars but not enough; falling because of famine, economic collapse, volcanic eruption and ensuing tsunami; because of dynastic inheritance, treaties, epidemics, corruption, or nationalism, because of anglos, frogs, nips, or jews.
Trying to fit all of this into a single mold, even if you're accepting inaccuracy in predictions, requires the mold to be extremely generic, to the point of being obvious and uninteresting; or, if your mold is even slightly less devoid of features, it requires you to distort and cut off bits, chunks, entire portions and swathes of truth as you fruitlessly try to make it fit actual history.

Yes, I meant that their industry, in the embryonic state it was in, couldn't support the same state of mobilization that Prussian or French industries could - eventually leading to the total collapse of their economy, leading in turn to the revolution (and tbh, France and Prussia themselves got close to the same fate). Ironically enough, the same chain of events might have almost happened to Soviet Russia during the first years of Barbarossa, hence the potential importance of lend-lease.

Thanks, didn't know that.

TL;DR:

It's not.
No empire had its people share a single identity; otherwise it would be a nation.
Oftentimes citizens kept trust in the empire until the empire ceased to exist.
Take a look at any list of human empires, have a quick read of how they ended; and you'll see that in the vast majority of cases, even if you try to simplify events and are willing to distort them, this simply didn't happen.

This genus of theories, I suspect, stems from the fact that Western consciousness is inevitably marked by the Western Roman Empire (ironic, considering what the Magyar was saying), and scarred by its fall, to the point they've become the Empire and the Fall, to the detriment of all other empires and falls; and too often people like you and I, fascinated by history and Rome, disillusioned in society and worried by the erosion of values, subscribe to a simplistic view of how and why the Fall of the Roman Empire happened, and succumb to the easy and charming, misleading and coarse drawing of crass parallels to the current state of Western Civilization; in what may be nothing more than yet another expression of the eternal and omnipresent "the world is going to shit" opinion that has been documented throughout all phases of all civilization ever since the Greeks; and, having drawn those parallels, extend them to the very concepts of "empire" and "fall of empires" in order to legitimize them.

You're ignoring specific reasons and replacing them your personal interpretation of uninteresting, and oftentimes unfitting, general reasons.

Those are all the straws that broke the camel's back, the final things which caused the collapse. John Glubb's postulate, for instance, focuses more on the forces that weaken an empire and prime it for a fall, and I think you can find a commonality there, which is increasing decadence as a result of the state redistributing wealth, which slowly but surely kills productivity. You don't think there's any meaningful cause-and-effect relation that can be drawn there, that can be generalized to most empires?

But the economy wasn't in collapse–like I said, it was steadily growing and would have continued if not for the Bolsheviks. Lend-lease was very important for the USSR, you're right there. I believe in the Barbarossa thread another user posted statistics that showed us burgers were supplying 25% of their foodstuff and 40% of their lead with lend-lease. But the reason for that wasn't a poor economy before the revolution, but the result of the Bolsheviks taking a nascent but fast-growing industrial sector and running it into the ground, because that's what commies do. Apologies if I come across as prickly, but I keep hearing commies say that communism would have worked just fine in my country if only it was "given a chance" to develop its industry. This irritates me just a bit, as the fucking pinkos were the ones who prevented industry from developing in the first place when they took over and burned that shit down. The goddamn nerves of these people, they'd shoot themselves in the head and blame capitalists for mining the lead in the bullet.

Yeah, it does, like the Roman empire at the beginning, the Japan Empire and the various China destiny.
Example, perhaps the germans of the 2nd Reich?
Ottoman empire failed because the smaller but stronger empires in Europe destroys them.
The same for the Mongol empire, destabilization of lost of leadership leading to various ethnic groups rising against it and toppling it.
The British empire with the American colonials gaining a single identity.
That's what I can name.

Even when they were just a kingdom the Romans were ruling over multiple distinct tribes. If you follow the Aenean founding myth rather than Romulus/Remus, the Romans themselves were complete foreigners in the Italian peninsula, being Greeks.

Do Koreans and the rest of Southeast Asia seem Japanese to you?

The founding myth is that the romans are troyans, not greek. Also, they have united everyone into a single entity of Roman.
No, and japanese don't pretend to. They are colonizing them.

I hope you'll pardon me if I start from your previous post with a point fatigue made me forget to write yesterday.

The same thing happens in any entity at any size. Taking for instance national countries: lawyers, taxists, soldiers, bakers all petition for benefits to their group at the implicit expense of the others; the old will want higher pensions while the young want less taxes; workers benefit from inflation while savers are damaged by it. In some empires, especially non-colonial ones, those transversal divisions can be more marked than the ethnical or cultural divide between subjects.

Back to your last post, now.
Sometimes those were the iron bars that broke the camel's back, by hitting it at high speed - Carthaginian, Napoleonic, Japanese empires weren't showing more than the usual share of corruption before they got extinguished. Were there other factors weakening them and priming them for fall? Sure. Did any empire fall for any single reason? Not a chance. Indeed, I'm the first to say that the fall of an empire is almost always a complicated affair.

I can also sort of agree here, with a couple reservations. Studying features inherent to empires, and how those participate in their fall, could have an interest, although I suspect it wouldn't be a very deep field and would soon precipitate into sophisms. However, I don't think those should be the focus (especially since it seems to inevitably be at the expense of the study of the specific causes, as this thread helps to show), and I don't think you can ever point out any single commonality as a leading cause of fall (not to speak of how those commonalities often cannot even be applied, as I've already argued).

This is starting to almost feel like a meme to me, in its actual meaning. Take the Roman Empire: the first considerable records we have are of authors of the late Republic. Those were lamenting the deterioration of both private and public morals of the late Kingdom, saying it led to the ends of Kings (with the educating tale of Tarquinius Superbus and Brutus); then lamenting the deterioration of the Republic, where at first great and uncorruptible men always saved Rome from the bad situations less great and more corrupted men had put it in, whereas now there are no more great and uncorruptible men (or those men are inevitably outmatched); and then taking both of those narrations as parallels to indicate that "modern" Rome, aka the late Republic, was going to shit because of decadence (the abandonment of the mos maiorum), even if was in its period of fastest expansion. Those were the first Roman authors we have extensive traces of; later authors, in all imperial ages, would all inevitably say the same things (if you'll allow this gross oversimplification of mine, of course) - ancient Rome was honest and great, modern Rome is decadent - all the way to the actual fall of (a part of) the Empire. And the people that witnessed this fall, I would imagine, said: "Ha! I was right all along! The decadence of modern Rome led to its fall!".

The truth is, I think, that corruption and incompetence is endemic to any organization; and that in large organizations, incompetence and corruption are more widespread and cause bigger damages (and for once it's not me inventing stuff, as this is basic management theory); and that when an empire inevitably falls, people, who're always eager to hate on corruption and incompetence and show to others and themselves their hate thereof; people, who always see an erosion of morals in their time; us people are a bit too quick to point our finger on the corruption and incompetence, and perceived decadence; sometimes ignoring other, in my taste more interesting, observations you could make on why the empire fell.

Yes, I think you can draw meaningful cause-and-effect relations there.
Eh, I'm kind of on the fence.

I've done some quick research, and I'm more confused than before. Some sources almost don't mention the economy at all, others mention that it was stretched thin by the war and then collapsed after the revolution, others are saying that the strain on the production and the transportation network caused by the war were leading causes of the revolution (e.g. P. Gatrell: Russia’s First World War. A Social and Economic History).
I'll take the easy way out and say this is one of the parts of history that I know the least, and that most of what I could say on the topic wouldn't be interesting or certain enough.

Tbh I feared I was the one who was coming across as prickly

Russia?

True, and nicely said.

The "Roman empire at the beginning" was aptly named a kingdom, and only ruled over its own people and the countryside surrounding Rome. It can hardly be called an Empire; and as soon as it started conquering other people in Italy, beginning with Alba Longa and the Sabines, it ceased to have a people with a single identity (another telling fact is that the last three of the seven kings of Rome was Etruscan).
Eventually, Alba Longan and Sabine identities were absorbed into the Roman one (somewhere in the late Kingdom/early Republic, I think), but by that point Rome already ruled over people distant from Rome both geographically and culturally. Those same Italian peoples would, several centuries later, revolt - almost succeeding in ending Rome in the Social War of 91-88 BC - showing they were not yet integrated in the "Roman identity", despite the addition of other, more alien people (e.g. Greeks, North Africans) to the Republic by that time.

Or maybe you're referring to the beginning of the Roman Empire proper, so the reign of Augustus (who came into power with a war that integrated Egypt as a province after Caesar had de facto vassalized it, bringing yet another people with its own separate identity into the "empire"), in which case you're still wrong.

You won't get me at the Roman game, I think.

As the burger said, it ruled over more than the Japanese.

Ayy lmao. Are you implying that China ever was an ethnically or culturally homogeneous union of people sharing a single identity? It's always been one people ruling over the others, until it gets overthrown and replaced by another people who rules over the others. Even today, despite all its propaganda and modern means of control, I'd hardly call the PRC a "nation" and say all Chinese (even if you exclude shit like Tibet, which you shouldn't) share a single identity.

But you seem to have missed my central point, beyond any specific example: the definition itself of "empire" requires it to be a single entity - generally governed by an emperor, but we'll ignore that part for the sake of this discussion - ruling over multiple nations or peoples (and thus I disagree with the definition in ), ergo not sharing a single identity. If it only ruled over a single people, it would be called either a nation, a colony, a kingdom or other names, depending on how it's ruled and whether the ruling class belongs to the people being ruled or not.

That's an interesting case, since some social classes had still trust in the Empire while others were on the brink of rebellion.
The first examples coming to mind are various ancient empires, such as the Carthaginian for whom we hold no record that I know of of demoralization within the army or the state, some of the empires that got split or absorbed after losing a war with an entity of similar power (such as the Japanese empire, where civilians - even some indoctrinated Koreans, if memory serves - were still willing to an hero for the emperor), most empires that ceased to exist because they got split between inheriting brothers (such as Charle Magne's HRE), and the Napoleonic Empire, whose emperor had to be sent to the other side of the world because his people would still follow him.

Troyans are greek.

The point is that Japanese and Koreans, both subjects of the same empire (even if not at the same level), did not share an identity: thus Japan and Korea got split after the war (and even countries that won the war suffered the same fate a short time later, even if only de jure). We were arguing how a single, national identity is a big help in keeping any nation together, among other benefits.

Sorry for triple posting, post length limits and my own autismo fucked me over.

Societies so stable that the size of their realms were constantly waxing and waning for centuries, then they completely disappeared.
That was impossible to maintain with their limited bureaucracy and broke down to smaller, more stable pieces.
I'm quite flabbergasted. So you don't deny that stability, urbanization and trade all were increasing in the previous period, in that period, and the period following this. Yet you can't entertain the idea that it's because they are all part of the same process, and it's not just the result of a long chain of unrelated events.
So did Italy revert into a peninsula of cannibal niggers when the centre of trade and culture shifted away from there? Or what is your point? There is also a smaller cycle described by Glubb (pdf related), and that's about this shifting of power. But that doesn't impact the greater of process of a high culture turning into a civilization under 1000 years.
Define what makes an empire an empire then, and we can speak.
Yes, because I'm the one who says that the name of the we wuz Romanz'n'shiiett movement of Italy can describe the trade, warfare and politics of a few centuries of Europe. Of course, it's not the same few centuries everywhere.
A simple traffic accident is an infinitely complex event, to fully understand it you'd have to push the bounds of physics and chemistry, and even biology if you want to account for the way the people who were part of it acted. Does it mean that we can't discuss how humans travel, because that would make us blind to a specific event?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
It seems like the chinks were so scarred by the fall of Rome that they developed a semi-religious doctrine based on the constant rise and fall of their dynasties. Mind you, this is about the "cycle of Glubb", and how even they observed it completely independent of Europe. Spengler's theory isn't about the world "going to shit". It's about the difference between culture and civilization, and how civilizations will inevitably go back to the politics of power despite all their sophistication. And it doesn't paint that in a morally positive or negative picture, he just says that this is how life goes on.
That reminds me, you should define civilization for us.

It's like saying that medical research shouldn't involve the study of aging, because people don't just get old and die. They usually break their bones, die to a common cold, get a stroke, get a heart attack, get cancer, or die because of some other reason. But not because they get old, and many people die well before they get old, therefore trying to understand why and how people grow old will make us blind to the real reasons of people dying. Does that really make sense for you?

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Is that first picture taken during a flood?

Stop making us look bad.

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I'm talking about that, how? Egypt is still Egypt when it's ruled over Roman, Greece the same. Roman Empire still holds the national identity as being Roman.
And? These countries are still under their own ethnic and culture, while the Japan empire still holds its japanese as their main national identity.
Its entity was Han chinese ruling over other small ethnicities.
Wrong? An empire is an entity but it can have many vassals in it, same for kingdom.
The 2nd Reich also was Germanization program for the poles and the czech that still inhabit parts of it. It still maintains its germanic identity.

So again, what are you talking about? Why is your empire so arbitrary?

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Yet an empire has its advantage of nationalism as well.

Nobody can deny the roman had nationalism, the japanese had nationalism, the germans have nationalism, despite the fact they colonized some other nations.

Same for the brits and french, even America.

The model that empire is inherently lacking nationalism is wrong.

here we go again

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I hope at some point this thread about renaissance firearms will, at some point, be about renaissance firearms.

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Agreed.

I wish we had this kind of discussions in /his/

Zig Forums is the best place to talk about any given subject, except guns.

Rome collapsed in on itself. Barbarians took advantage of that when they were weakened and drowning in chaos to take over and establish a "Barbarian Empire" with what remained of Rome (not destroy what was already there).

Sun Tzu. In fact, Sun Tzu was the biggest reason for Napoleon's success, and forgetting about the former's teachings eventually led to the latter's failures in Russia.
Modern democracy is far removed from the original Greek democracy. It might as well not even be called that.

Early muskets were very unreliable in terms of accuracy and power. Knights adopted them to defeat lesser-armored opponents. If they were powerful enough to invalidate plate that easily, plate would've been phased out quicker. Plate was often tested against early firearms to gauge their quality and protection. People like Emperor Maximilian II would shoot their breastplates with an arquebus to test them and ensure that they would protect him from bullets for example. In the later 16th century, when firearms truly started coming into their own, armor was 'proofed' to different levels - some armor would be only pistol-proof, while the strongest (and heaviest) breastplates would be musket-proof.

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Nevertheless the cultural heritage is still there, and the major deviations from Greek democracy only started in the last century. With only free landowning citizens having the right to vote, the early US had more similarities to the greek form.

You should learn more about history. Early firearms were Hand Cannons(1326-14xx), which were late replaced by the Arquebus(1411-1600) as Infantry weapons.
The Musket was first a type of heavy Arquebus and then developed into its own thing after 1521 and they started to replace the Arquebus by 1550.
In other words early firearms were used a good century before the musket was a thing.
Strelok proper Plate armor was a thing owned by the rich, common soldiers especially foot soldier rarely wore a full suit of plate armor, usually they only had a helmet, a breastplate and/or chain maile. Your picture show people usually employed as cavalry.
This is what people commonly ignore then they talk about the effective of bows, crossbows and early firearms in medieval times, yes the armor could stop them, however few combatants at that time were completely covered from had to toe in plate armor.
Some Breastplates were created to be bullet proof and tested in that way, but not all of them. Once again this leave the rest of the body unprotected and as firearms became more common Plate was replaced with more flexible armor.

You should learn more about firearms. Early hand cannons were extremely inaccurate due to the volatility of gunpowder, imperfections during the manufacturing of the projectile and the guns themselves, and weight of the solid iron barrels. The main advantages of early hand cannons was that they were cheap and much easier to manufacture en mass compared to warbows and crossbows and didn't require as much training for ordinance men. Other than that, they were more of a psychological weapon and smoke screen device (from the burning powder) than they were long range weapons, and a skilled bowman could still match them. There's a reason why they were replaced in less than a century. Even early muskets were still only half as effective due to barrel/projectile machining not being quite on par yet until the age of Colonization. Hell, rifling wasn't even viable until the late 19th century. You're overestimating them with anecdotes of when they started to replace other weaponry, when in fact their effectiveness was only really earned when they were finally commonplace by the 1600s with volley fire.
Just because they were used, doesn't mean they were a complete upgrade over other time-tested weapons. They went through a lot of changes from the 1300s to the 1600s specifically because they were lacking in factors they were expected to excel at.
Yeah, no shit, Hans. I'm specifically talking about people who had access to them, not common peasantry. I know only the rich could buy them, and that they'd often buy the parts over time due to exorbitant prices for quality production, especially in Northern Italy/Southern Germany. What's your point?
Obviously, but they were developed further with the introduction of firearms. And that's IF said firearms were accurate at all by stroke of luck. Plate armor was very notorious for being very hard to punch through, be it with bows, pole weapons or early guns. There's a reason why the dagger was well known as the biggest "knightkiller" in those times, at least until proper matchlocks showed up.

Anyone who had access to plat armor was most likely rich enough to afford a horse as well. Most knights did, because they weren't dumb. Walking into battle is for peasants.

The idea that good armor was reserved for the rich by the time fire arms sorta went mainstreams is false. They had munitions armor.

That is beside the point. Plate armor partially evolved because of the thread of lance attacks that cavalry faced during the medieval age and whole Plate suits became a thing, since a Knight has a greater need to protect his whole body than a foot soldier.
Unless its a revolt peasants or they are getting looted by warriors, peasants didn't fight. Yet the majority of medieval and early modern armies were neither Knights nor Peasant, but commoners and free men. Most of them were too poor to buy a horse and were used as foot soldiers.

Its not false, since munitions armor is a concept of the Early Modern Military with its Standing Armies.
Medieval Armies didn't have the concept munitions armor, the majority of soldiers had to buy their own stuff which left most of them with something like pic 1, which was worn on its own or over a chain mail hauberk.
Early Modern munition armor for Infantry looked like pic 2 and pic 3 and it was not bullet proof plate armor. Bullet proof plate armor looks usually like pic 4 and was worn by heavy cavalry like the Cuirassier, which again came usually from the upper class of society.

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And crossbows.
Cavalry has always faced these threats. In fact, Plat armor has been in development since the 1st century starting with helmets. It saw a gradual development, with each individual part being crafted from trial and error over many centuries until it culminated into what we know as the full plate armor. It didn't show up overnight. It was always there, albeit incomplete, until the 15th century.
"Peasant" is a general/umbrella term for serfs and commoners.
In medieval times, if you were living in a King's territory and he picked beef with another King, unless you lived in a remote location away from villages like a mountain or a cave (which was suicide in those times), you're pretty much expected to pay taxes and go to war on demand, serf or commoner, like it or not. There was no waste of contingency, especially in the dark ages.
Also with the advent of firearms, monarchs and leaders finally started giving a shit about their armies and started suiting them up with some degree of armor - not of noble quality, but still present.

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Sauce of quote?

Would the sword carried by the guy in the second pic be considered a broadsword? A sidesword? A rapier? It seems long enough and pointy enough to be a rapier but I thought they used shorter and broader blades for war.
Also how would you classify the broader&shorter blades? Sideswords?

Hilted rapier.
There's many designs, but the most well known is the bastard sword.

He's sperging out because the statue in its paint has light hair. He's pretty much saying

Quite, it was the era of pike and shot formations.

With the introduction of the bayonet. The musket became the pole arm too.

The Renaissance saw them get phased out, I don't now when they stopped appearing but poorer and more rural places kept using them for longer. From the late middle ages on there was an ever growing proportion of muskets in comparison to traditional weapons, they start of in small numbers but they become ever more common.

It declined in with the popularity of the musket(there were other factors in this such as mobility in modern tactics and cost). By the end of the Renaissance really only cuirassiers used plate armour and even then just a breast plate and helm.

Late medieval tactics start to see the use of guns but it's very situational, wagon forts become common so as to protect the musketeers. Pikes start seeing wide spread use and the Spanish tercio revolutionises their use. Spanish tactics see a large block of pikes with a thin skirt of musketeers on the edges. The Dutch then adapt and form smaller and easy to manage formations in two-three layers as well as increase the number of musketeers and change how they are used. The Swedes will add to this again and finally Renaissance tactics reach there peak with the Germans. With this there will be two to three lines of numerous smaller formations supporting each other but there is also an emphasis on combined arms. Spread amongst these formations will be small units of cavalry ready to rush into gaps and on the flanks where the bulk of the cavalry is there are small units of musketeers ready to support the cavalry.

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One thing I rarely see mentioned is grenades. The Byzantines had incendiary grenades as early as the ~700's and by the 1600's explosives and cast iron frag grenades were in wide usage especially for sieges.

I meant this, fren.

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The chinese had bombs, grenades, and cluster missiles too. Makes me wonder how the fuck they still managed to lose against the mongols.

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Medieval field armies were fully mounted. Soldiers who fought on foot were essentially dragoons.

"Real" foot soldiers were exceptions such as Scots, Swiss. Or town guards who weren't deployed in the field. Foot field soldiers were Renaissance thing (most known examples are Landsknecht)

There is study about proofing using actual surviving armors with proof marks. Basically most proofmarks were marketing scam left by greatly under-powered shots. These proof dents are too small for full power hits.

True for early Middle ages, less for late Middle Ages and completely wrong for Renaissance. During Renaissance times munition set of armor cost fell to the 3-4 month salary of the soldiers.

Wrong, crossbows are just a more effective way to conduct missile attacks and produce missile weapons. They weren't armor killers.
Once again your lack of knowledge shows, Cavalry didn't always face this thread. First horses had to be breed to be strong enough to carry a man on their back, the lack of this ability was the reason why Chariots were a thing in Antiquity and to be able to conduct Lance attacks, Stirrups had to be invented first, they came to Europe during the 7th Century through Asian Invasions like the Avars. Horses have been domesticated around 3500 BC in Europe, meaning that Lance attacks weren't a thing for a good 4000 years.
Equally there is a difference in History between facing a threat and having the technology to do something against the threat. The famous European Plate armor was possible since Europe advanced in Metallurgy during the Late Medieval Period.
If we talk about Plate armor as a concept, then Plate armor has existed since the Bronze Age, if we talk about the Plate armor type which the Medieval Knights were famous for that later became the model for Early Modern Munition Plate armor Europe, its a 15th century development. Knights and the majority of other combatants during the medieval age primarily wore chain maile armor.
Also wrong, Peasant come from a 15th century French word used for Farmers who rent Land from a Lord, these Farmers had three classes Slave, Serf and Free Tenant. A Peasant could be a Commoner, but not all Commoners were Peasants. Also People living in Cities were never Peasants.
Thinking every one that isn't an Aristocrats is a Peasants is one of the common mistake people make about Medieval Society and one of the gravest, because it show a complete lack of understanding how Medieval Society operated.
Complete and utterly wrong, Farmers didn't go to war. A medieval Farmer who gets told he has to go to war would think his King is crazy or a tyrant and flee. Going to war was the duty of the Aristocracy, who paid Knights and Vassals to got to war with them and people living in cities had to duty to serve as a city guard for a period of time, which was enforced by the cities council.
Additionally there were people that existed outside the feudal system, in Germany they were called Vogelfrei. These people many time lived as professional mercenaries for the Knights and the Vassals.
On top of that, not all countries in Medieval Europe were ruled by a King. For example the Frisians in North Germany and the Netherlands still had Chieftains until the 16th Century and Poland started out as a Christian Dutchy. Then you had the Territory of Knight Orders, like the Teutonic Knights and Territory held by invaders from West Asia like the Muslim Caliphates and the different Tribes of Steppe Nomads.
Also not true, they started to give a shit since massed infantry tactics became important, which happened before fire arms were commonly used.

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Wrong, Europe didn't have enough Horses for that. There is a good video from scholagladiatoria, which talks about how much medieval Soldiers were paid. Mounted Archer(not Archers that shot from the horse like the Mongols, but Archers that had a horse) had higher pay than Archers without Horses.
youtube.com/watch?v=lUsYzRWcVv8
False, what made Renaissance foot soldiers special was that they were used in massed infantry tactics like the Pike square. Foot soldiers have been the back bone of Armies since forever.
Yes, but once again that is beside the point. Chain Mail armor had been around since antiquity, yet medieval Chain Mail was better thanks to the advancements metallurgy. Also there was a difference in the quality of chain maile made for a simple Vassal and chain maile made for a Noble.
The point is that not every Renaissance soldier or even the majority of Renaissance Soldiers ran around in bullet proof munitions armor, which was reserved for the higher class troops.
As I pointed out at the beginning of the thread, the Renaissance is a period covering both part of the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Period, its not the time between those two. Also the salary of soldiers changed drastically several time in this period. Early Landsknechts had a really high pay, with many coming from the lower nobility, later Landsknechts had really poor pay and were mostly commoners.

Because most Chinese history is bullshit lies made up in the 1980s.

Three quarters of their "historical" artifacts were made during that time, including the shit that "proves" they had guns and bombs.

Proof marks done by scammy smiths were bullshit, not much so when tests were carried out by the client.

I mean that plate was developed because maille was insufficient in protecting against piercing from warbows and crossbows, not because said bows were piercing plate. They very seldom did, if at all.
Yes, they did. Your ignorance is getting out of hand. Even in the times of charioteers (who already used pole weapons), before proper warhorses and armor, they already faced threats such as Macedonian sarissa phalanxes all the way back to 360 BC.
It's an amalgamation of developments that date from before the Middle Ages.
Because building a full set of plate took time, money and effort, especially for knights, who had them tailored to fit the client specifically. Having a full set of quality armor was a feat for nobles. Also, most combatants primarily wore gambeson - cheap and easy to make, especially compared to riveted maille, for standard infantry.
Oratores, bellatores, laboratores. Unlike artisans (craftsmen, smiths, merchants), peasants (farmers, serfs, and volunteers) weren't called upon to war as standard, only when support was needed, but there were occurrences, and yes, the campaigns did make them stop their labor, so much so that it sometimes caused famine, which consequently caused riots and revolutions, of which many failed, but still happened. See the People's Crusade, or when Simon Montfort assembled a peasant army in Kent in 1264. Peasants were the commonage, not aristocrats, not nobles, not lesser nobles, not royalty, not clergy. They worked and paid, either in currency, farmed products, or manpower in the feudal system.
Yes, it happened. Many died that way.
Leading* the war was. The contingency had to be built by them, but not completely made out of themselves. There were mercenaries, paid workers, peasants, and paid, trained elite (knights).
But most of it was.
The Knight orders were military orders led by Grandmasters (who were comparable to the Pope in position and power) and were akin to self-sufficient paramilitary forces. They managed to amass a lot of wealth by aiding Christians in the territories they were in. They only ever settled feudal states, and sometimes bought land, as was the case when the Templars bought Cyprus off from Richard I. Beyond that they didn't enforce anything major that feudalism didn't already do.

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According to that pic the renaissance had a neoclassical style of architecture. Contrast it with your words:

Either you are wrong, or that almighty dictionary is incorrect. Which one is it?

So then, let's see what wikipedia has to say about this subject!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance
>The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation.[11] The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance":
>It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization—historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science—but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.[12]
>Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity,[13] while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras,[14] which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".[15]
But there is more!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages#Historiography_and_periodization
>For 18th-century historians studying the 14th and 15th centuries, the central theme was the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of ancient learning and the emergence of an individual spirit.[6] The heart of this rediscovery lies in Italy, where, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt: "Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such".[7] This proposition was later challenged, and it was argued that the 12th century was a period of greater cultural achievement.[8]
>Modern historiography on the period has reached a consensus between the two extremes of innovation and crisis. It is now generally acknowledged that conditions were vastly different north and south of the Alps, and the term "Late Middle Ages" is often avoided entirely within Italian historiography.[13] The term "Renaissance" is still considered useful for describing certain intellectual, cultural, or artistic developments, but not as the defining feature of an entire European historical epoch.[14] The period from the early 14th century up until – and sometimes including – the 16th century, is rather seen as characterized by other trends: demographic and economic decline followed by recovery, the end of western religious unity and the subsequent emergence of the nation state, and the expansion of European influence onto the rest of the world.[14]
It's like you are just repeating outdated ideas about the renaissance, and even fucking kikepedia is more up-to-date than you.

Bonus round:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Bruni
>While it probably was not Bruni's intention to secularize history, the three period view of history is unquestionably secular and so Bruni has been called the first modern historian.[2] The foundation of Bruni's conception can be found with Petrarch, who distinguished the classical period from later cultural decline, or tenebrae (literally "darkness"). Bruni argued that Italy had revived in recent centuries and could therefore be described as entering a new age.
So he was wewuzing about Rome so hard he thought people in the previous millennium were living in total darkness. And that's why we are supposed to cut European history in half at a random point.

Says the one who has no idea how a non-urbanized society looks like. It has three castes: rulers, warrios and common folk. The rulers use the warriors both to tax and to protect the common folk. If they get conquered the surviving members of the ruling caste will most likely lose their status, and it's up-in-the-air what will happen with the warriors, but it can be rather negative too. So if those kingdoms constantly change, then the most important parts of society don't enjoy any kind of stability. And they are the ones who provide the stability required for urbanization and long-distance trade. After all, the renaissance was possible exactly because by that time Italy was highly urbanized, and so they had citizens and even urbanite élites that gladly used their time, money and power to promote intellectual and artistic endeavours.
Excuse me, I didn't realize that the Frankish Empire still exist.
POSITIVISM! IT'S FUCKING POSITIVISM!
Urbanization was constantly rising because new civilizations developed, one after the other, and they all had their own territories that they urbanized. What made it explode is that the Faustian civilization is much better in such technical matters than any one before, and so it made possible to develop even greater cities. And this civilization has the greatest reach, to the point that even the wildlands of Africa are full of cities now. But that doesn't mean there are no cycles of rise-and-fall working "inside" individual civilizations. Or do you honestly deny the fact that Rome fell from a metropolis of 1-2 million people to the size of a bigger town?
I was clearly asking you if Italy turned into into a peninsula of cannibal niggers after the end of the renaissance.
I said that because China would need a catastrophe of that magnitude to end up as the Roman Empire. But wait, if I understand you correctly the Roman Empire never disappeared, just like the Frankish Empire!

...

Before gommunism (and maybe still) they were the civilizational equivalent of an autistic hoarder tinkering with random shit in his shed and never throwing anything away, no matter how retarded. They might have been messing around with gunpowder since those firelances from 900ad (possibly even 300ad) or whatever but they kept using them right up until the forced modernisation of Judeo-Communist rule.

Even during the Warlords period around 1900-1946 or something, there were ant people seriously trying to devise strategies for and employ sword and shield, repeating crossbow, three-barrel hand-cannon troops etcetera against modernised rifle battalions, they just can't throw anything away.

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as to why it didn't work against the mongols and every other invader for 2000 years
vs
even if they had 50,000 conscripts with wicker shields and nice spears with decorative plumes that's not much help
also mongorians had all sorts of their own actually optimised equipment and armour, better horses etc etc from actually fighting things more scary than a horde of starving peasants, for hundreds of years

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if it's stupid but it might possibly work one time in a hundred, then it's chinese

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Roman culture customs and views on the world were definitively destroyed with the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Pretending that Faustian civilization and Roman civilization are the same thing is a meme.

Yeah, it's not like we or the scholars of yore ever had access to the writings of Virgil, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius or anything like that. It's not as if scholars read those works, were influenced by them, and incorporated many of their ideals and philosophies into their own publications. Not as if Roman architectural epithets and symbology are still present in modern culture. I mean, imagine if the national bird of the US was the eagle, that'd just be crazy!

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boyfuckers and pedos are still the elites of our societies.

Yeah, that was not a feature of the Roman Empire.

The reason the mongols won was that they stole from the civilization they conquered, like the Tangut.

What do you think they were until Temujin?

Mostly steppe tribes with their own culture and innovations supported by and developed from the importation of Chinese and Arab technology, for example the superheavy cavalry of the ancient northern Xiongnu, Xianbei and Dingling tribes. I'm aware the Mongols only rose to prominence after the big boy himself knocked heads together to form a proper nation out of tribes, like a Zulu precursor.

Something else I didn't point out is that I'm fairly sure every time China was conquered it was because of outsiders exploiting their empirical cycle of basically being guaranteed to fuck themselves up with corruption and overexpansion every 400 years on average.

Please tell me that your beliefs are consistent enough to consider Davido-kun to be real Japanese. After all he speaks the language and apes their customs.

Nomads acquire specialists by importing people, because it's faster and more straightforward than trying to learn their ways. If the Mongols needed siege engineers they bought them from China. If they needed craftsmen they forced craftsmen from Europe, the Middle East and Asia to live on their lands. Magyar tribes had this same thing going on, e.g. the Székelys are most likely the descendants of tribes whose sole purpose was to defend the borders. People from all around Europe were kidnapped to be peasants on their new lord's land. And they used tons of mercenaries, both other nomads and vikings. Our first dynasty kept doing the same thing. Our first king needed European heavy cavalry, and so he invited German knights to live here and made them part of the nobility. Later when the rulers wanted towns and cities they invited settlers from west. When they needed light cavalry they settled whole tribes of Eurasian nomads in the middle of the country. Libruls today like to argue how this makes us some kind of a multikulti nation.

I never claimed Euros or Americans were Romans, so there is no contradiction in my denying that fact.

Can I get sources on that? I'd greatly appreciate it.

The "Roman Empire" of the idealistic, romanticized kind, that the Renaissance made up and the semi-educated still believe in, never really existed, and the classical empire it meant to represent was destroyed in a civil war between 235 and 284 AD.

The customs and wordviews of the "Dark Ages" are indistinguishable from those of the Late Roman period, and even Christianity itself is just an amalgamation of the period's public morals, mystery cults, and fashionable philosophies.

I didn't know the Mongols and Manchus exploited Hume's philosophical tradition to take over China.

But aside the joke, it is true that decadent empires can only stay in power by making their subjects weaker.

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Every fucking time

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t. Zig Forumseddit

t. VPN jumping, thread hopping faggot.

You better delet that Jewish, communist garbage.

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Stay mad cheeto dick sucking Zig Forumsedditor

[AUTISTIC HUN THROAT-SINGING]

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In short, they steal shit and didn't maintain their culture, which is why some mongols become fucking muslims i.e. the Timur.

That empire is never gonna last because of the lack of unision of identity.

Which is false, since both cannot pierce proper maille armor.
Are you really comparing polearms carried by Infantry with Cavalry lance attacks? Look up the type of Lances carried before stirrups were common, then look at the Lances carried by European Calvary after plate armor became uncommon on the Battlefield.
To survive the attacks of the more heavier Lances made possible by stirrups the Medieval Knights started to wear plate armor over their chainmail and the process continued until the full suit of plate armor was developed.
You don't need plate armor to defend yourself against arrows and crossbow bolts, there are easier, cheaper and lighter ways to do so.
The common weapons of charioteers were the Bow and Javelins. They didn't run over the Infantry with Lance attacks, they drove up to them, shot arrows or speers at them and then moved out of range. They were basically the inventors of Drive-by-Shooting.
In other words I was right, because the ones who fight are the bellatores and not the laboratores and not every laboratores is a peasant and you are counting down the exceptions to make it look that you weren't wrong.
Half truth, most combatants wore gambesons, but they also wore other armor over it. Plate armor was expensive, equally a high quality hauberk of maille, but there was an entire market for second rate, second hand and inherited armors.
It happened as often as female warriors, but just because Spain had the Order of the Hatchet didn't mean that female combatants were a common thing.

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15th century spanned crossbows could penetrate both maille and gambeson at once, especially with target point arrowheads. Maille is specifically more vulnerable to piercing than slashing.
Yes? Lances and spears are pole weapons. What else would they be?
You're riding on too many arbitrary definitions on weapon types snobbish 19th century people came up with, giving a myriad of fancy categories to medieval weapons like "longsword", "broadsword", "zweihander". Medieval people just called them "sword" and "double handed sword" in manuscripts and called it a day.
And yes, even medieval combatants used the same lances on foot as well as on horseback. They're not exclusive to any method. Also, those lances in your pic are jousting lances. They were specifically designed to protect the wielder's hand during jousts, and break easily upon striking jousting armor as to minimize the death rate of competitors. Even so, many people complained that jousting weapons were too tame and that they should return to the original form of jousting with real battlefield lances.
Wrong. The "Platemail" combo never existed. Knights wore specially-tailored gambeson coats with patches of maille sewn on top of areas that were left vulnerable in the plate armor's gaps - the arming doublet.
If you willingly ignore the historical records of laboratores being employed in battles and the unrest and revolts caused by the practice, sure.
Quality maille was pricey, but sure. Quality gambeson on the other hand could match, and even surpass maille in protection, thus rendering it redundant. Prior to plate, maille was considered the apex of protection, and the smithing skill and material needed to make a quality set was not cheap. Second rate stuff was rather placebo.

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Here's what most lances/spears actually looked like on the battlefield.

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ROFLMAO

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